Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Heads Up, Journalists

I was reading an article in The Atlantic Monthly, called China's Great Leap Backwardand the article below was mentioned. I think it should be required reading for all aspiring journalists. Trump has proved no friend to the press, and in my opinion, we could start seeing the kind of thing described below in the US.

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A man reads the Southern Weekly at a newsstand in Beijing. The once
respected liberal broadsheet was forced to censor its content.
Photograph: Jason Lee/Reuters

China's young reporters give up on journalism: 'You
can't write what you want'

The ever greater constraints placed on news reporting by Xi
Jinping mean many Chinese journalists see no point in pursuing a media career

When a 7.9-magnitude earthquake ripped through Sichuan province in May 2008,
Lin Tianhong, a 29-year-old reporter at China Youth Daily, was one of the first to
volunteer to head into the disaster zone. “Everyone wanted to go,” he recalled. “Otherwise, why be a journalist?” Hours later the Beijing-based reporter was flying towards Sichuan’s
shattered countryside for what would be one of the most horrifying and defining
moments of his short career in journalism.

“His mother wanted to put new clothes on him, but Cheng Lei’s body had grown
stiff,” the journalist wrote. “The couple knelt before his corpse, stroking his
hands and feet, calling out his name over and over again.”

The heart-wrenching article earned Lin the respect of his editors and the
adulation of a generation of Chinese reporters. But fast-forward seven years
and the former high-flier has abandoned his notepad and pen and given up on
journalism.

“Boredom,” says Lin, who now works in PR on the 19th floor of Beijing’s
World Profit Center, when asked to explain his decision. “One day I woke up in
the morning [and] asked myself: do you still think it is fun doing the same
thing over and over again each day?”

Beijing’s decision to expel the French journalist Ursula Gauthier
in December has thrust the dispiriting situation facing foreign correspondents
in China into the headlines. But Chinese journalists are facing far greater
challenges – and many reporters are simply turning their back on the profession
as a result.

French
journalist Ursula Gauthier approaches the security gate before boarding a
flight to France after her expulsion from China. Photograph: Fred
Dufour/AFP/Getty Images

David Bandurski, an expert on
Chinese journalism from the University of Hong Kong, said an exodus was now
under way from the country’s newspapers as talented young journalists decided
there was no future in the profession.

“We have reporters in their 30s and
40s who generally would be at the height of their professional careers in
journalism who have left,” he said. “The mood is quite dismal right now in
China’s media.”

Experts say two key factors are
driving the hollowing out of Chinese newsrooms. One is the increasingly bleak
financial situation facing newspapers as they struggle to adapt to the digital
age. The other is the ever greater constraints being placed by President Xi
Jinping’s increasingly authoritarian Communist party on what can and cannot be
reported.

“It’s really a kind of double
whammy,” said Bandurski, who traces the current political chill to Xi’s rise to
power in late 2012.

Lin, who now works for a film company run by the billionaire Jack Ma’s Alibaba group, denied politics were
behind his decision to quit journalism, instead pointing to the dwindling
readership and influence of Chinese newspapers. “Nowadays, nobody reads your
stories,” he said. “Nowadays, readers are all living inside their smartphones
or inside WeChat.”

But his frustration with censorship
was evident in a blogpost in 2014 when he lashed out at the
destruction of Southern Weekly, the once respected liberal broadsheet that
he said had inspired him to become a journalist.

“All these years, people like us
have seen our articles killed and our voices silenced, and we’ve started to get
used to it. We started to make compromises and to censor ourselves,” Lin
reportedly wrote at the time. “We’ve gone too far, as if we have forgotten
why we had chosen this industry to begin with.”

Despite such problems Lin, who
resigned from his last journalism job in April 2014, said it was still possible
to write worthwhile journalism in China. “It’s just like a
person has 10 fingers. There is one finger you can’t use but the other nine all
work. There is one story you can’t write but there are still nine others you
can.”

Asked what the 10th finger was, Lin
laughed. “It’s the same for you,” he replied. “I guess I don’t need to say it
out loud.”

Other young journalists are far less optimistic. “Being a journalist has no
meaning any more,” said a thirtysomething editor from one of China’s leading
news organisations. “My greatest feeling is that in recent years the industry’s
freedoms have reached their lowest ebb in history.”

Before the Xi Jinping era, editors at least had the autonomy to choose their
own headlines, the journalist complained. Now newspapers and websites were
forced to conform to a tedious monotony of praise for China’s Communist
leaders. “The top headline must [always] be about Xi Jinping and the second
must be about [prime minister] Li Keqiang,” the editor said. “If you read one
website, you have read them all.”

In the past, Chinese newspapers endured six-month-long government crackdowns
in silence but would emerge from those periods by publishing a powerful
investigative report or exposé. “We are not seeing those kind of examples any
more,” the academic said. “We are seeing much more silence.”

Newspapers or websites that still
tried to push the boundaries found themselves slapped back into line. A recent
investigation into the social and environmental cost of the Three Gorges Dam by
Shanghai’s

“The winter has turned into an ice
age in terms of media,” Bandurski said. “For investigative reporting it has
worsened steadily since 2005 and then of course the Olympics was a tough time.
But since 2012 under Xi it has just gotten much, much worse.”

Lin, who has a three-year-old son, said he had no regrets over his decision
to abandon an industry whose days were numbered. “Chinese media is a disaster
now. Even if these talented people stayed, what could they do?” he said of the
ongoing exodus of young reporters.

After more than a decade in the business, the editor, who declined to be
named for fear of reprisals, said he was also on the verge of resigning.
“Freedom is very important – it is the most important thing – but we don’t have
it in China, especially in journalism,” he said.

“You can’t write what you want. You can’t interview who you want. And even
if you do, you can’t publish it. Working in the Chinese media feels like you
are wasting your life.”

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This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
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There will be rants. It's an election year, and I am beginning to have a political dimension to my personality. I am also horrified at the level of injustice and violence visited upon people here in the US and elsewhere - particularly against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Some of these stories will be very hard to read, but I believe we must read them to keep ourselves mindful of the racist and vicious things that happen every day, to speak out when we see discrimination, and root out its evil from ourselves.